Relationship Building Through Empathy, Networking, and Authenticity with Katy Howell

Mike (00:03.4)
Katie, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. It's great to see a very, very friendly and warm face, so thank

Katy Howell (00:07.249)
Yeah, I can see that.

Katy Howell (00:14.005)
Yep.

Mike (00:30.6)
I mean, it's been many years that we've been, we were talking before, you we've known each other for many years now. And it's, it's more than a business relationship. It's a friendship now. So, and I love

Katy Howell (00:40.053)
Yeah, me too, me too.

Mike (00:41.906)
Brilliant. So I'm not going to introduce you. You can introduce yourself, Katie. So basically, who are you? What do you do? And anything unusual that you'd like to tell the audience.

Katy Howell (00:51.201)
So I'm Katie Howe and I have been running a social media agency for 20 years back when it was MySpace and Twitter was just coming out of the gates at that point. And I'm mum to two grownups now. Unusual, I've got a couple of unusual things. First of all, I am a woman of colour that's founded a business in marketing, which is

Mike (00:57.821)
Wow.

Mike (01:02.94)
Yep.

Katy Howell (01:20.001)
less rare now but was very rare 20, 30 years ago. And the other is that I have a science background in my degree. did genetics and plant sciences as my degree and actually followed all the science routes until I came to the other end.

Mike (01:23.528)
20 years ago. Exactly.

Mike (01:38.344)
So just out of interest, Katie, that kind of genetics and plant science, do you think that gives you a different perspective on the way you look at things in business and in life?

Katy Howell (01:47.699)
Yes, think I'm probably there's two things. One is I'm more analytical maybe and I'm not frightened of a spreadsheet or two. know, you do probabilities as part of your degree, you're kind of quite natural with the stats. And you've seen me be like that as well. And the other one is that I think I don't think I've ever stopped learning. I think by making this switch between science.

Mike (02:02.129)
You are.

I have. Very much so.

Mike (02:11.559)
Yes.

Katy Howell (02:15.387)
arts and creativity. don't think I have, in every possible way, I try and learn something along the way. I think it's the thing that drives me.

Mike (02:26.514)
Be a lifelong learner. I'm always saying to our son, and it's his life, he'll live it as he chooses. But when he says at any age, what things did you focus on in life, dad? I always say, being a curious person and a lifelong learner will take you quite a long way actually in life.

Katy Howell (02:44.095)
Yeah, totally. Be a why child, I always say to my kids.

Mike (02:47.592)
Yeah, exactly. Yep, be head of questions, not head of answers. So let's start off with a question. So we've got kind of three broad topics just to discuss for the next 25 minutes or so. Let's start off with who are our buyers really?

Katy Howell (02:52.651)
Yes.

Katy Howell (03:06.127)
that's a great question, isn't it? Because I guarantee you, most of us in B2B know who our buyers are. They'll be IT directors, marketing CMOs, whatever it is, we have this category, this lump, but actually, I don't think we do know our buyers at all. We think we do. We have this view. And I went to a round table very recently with a lot of

When I asked probing questions, they don't know the answer. And in particular, it's about leaning into the psychographics, understanding those behaviors. And this matters a huge amount. There's behaviors and then there's also empathy. And right now, empathy is probably your strongest play because we need to build relationships. We talked about this earlier. We need to build relationships. And part of that is understanding where your customer really is.

Mike (03:58.301)
We do.

Katy Howell (04:03.265)
So your typical ICP does not do that. When you define the ICP or create a persona, you don't actually have the empathy. A really good example is in it for CMOs at the moment, or people in marketing, they are worn down. There's a Gart report showing that, you know, 60 % of those in marketing are heading for burnout, which is horrifying when you think about

Mike (04:28.818)
Wow, this is horrifying.

Katy Howell (04:31.751)
I speak to a lot of marketers, they are exhausted. are quite often having to do tasks, they're under resourced, they're having to run from month to month to month because B2B is all about lead gen. And if you have that understanding, you know why the big proposal doesn't work. You can have empathy as to why you need to maybe chunk it up or help them sell to the SCFO or all of these things require a little bit of EQ.

And I think that this is rising. And then a few weeks ago, I went to B2B Ignite, the B2B marketing kind of annual event in the UK. And there was some really, really interesting insight around what are the drivers for purchase, whether they're professional or personal. And most of my working life, which is nearly 40 years, it's been professional drivers in B2B. For the first time

Mike (05:06.854)
Right. Yes.

Katy Howell (05:29.803)
personal drivers have taken over.

Mike (05:32.144)
What does that mean, Katie? What, what, what a personal drivers mean in terms of that B2B sales engagement.

Katy Howell (05:35.957)
Well, it's the more emotional drivers. people who are uncertain about their roles or worried about the current climate or worried about their job security, all of these things that our very senior buyers and junior, whatever level they are, all our buyers are concerned about, are going to put personal reasons before anything else. Do I trust this organization? Do I feel that they will make me look good?

Do they understand the challenges I have? All of these things are much more personal drivers. Yes.

Mike (06:13.104)
is this gonna go wrong? If I choose this supplier and it goes wrong, there's a great piece of research again by Ted McKenna and Matt Dixon, who wrote a book called Jolt. Matt Dixon was the guy who the Challenger Sale, which we probably both have read many times. And Jolt, they talk about this, and it's not generic, but massive amounts of research was done about when people don't make a decision to buy,

It's safer for them not to make a decision than make a decision that might go wrong. They're less likely to get fired if they just don't make a decision. And that's what you're talking to.

Katy Howell (06:54.709)
Yeah. Yeah. And that empathy is absolutely crucial. Because when you when you begin to get your head into that, there's two things. First of all, you begin to understand what you need to do to make progress, which is two or three things. The first is, as I said, you know, Ryan Hall calls them and I love the term gateway products, like drugs, which is something small that you can get over the line to build the relationship. So it could be a small

audit or a small thing that we want to get across a trial all those things in

Mike (07:24.498)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, it adds value, it gives you some data and it starts the relationship.

Katy Howell (07:34.963)
Yeah, exactly. And the other is give stuff away. And when I mean give stuff away, I don't mean product, I mean knowledge. You've got buyers with busy, busy brains who are desperately trying to absorb everything that keeps changing. And let's face it, those of us like me and myself who work in the digital world, everything keeps changing. mean, it was all going to be cookieless now we've got cookies back, but it's really cookieless.

Mike (07:59.962)
Exactly. I saw there's been a turnaround. Yeah, exactly.

Katy Howell (08:04.273)
But it's still going to happen, know, I mean, it's not going away. And for me, there's this big challenge, which is everything keeps changing. as experts in our field, in our specific field, that's the thing that we need to focus on and help others to understand that education is a large amount. And in fact, again, that Ignite study, there was this really super interesting piece of data that looked at

were the triggers for purchase and what was likely to build trust. And in particular, it was thought leadership that I thought was really interesting because it was at number 20 in previous years, somewhere floating around the bottom. It's now the third most important. And this, this in my head tells me that our buyers want to understand what, what they're buying, what the landscape is, what the market looks like. They want knowledge. That's the transaction. Knowledge is the transaction.

Mike (08:46.077)
Well.

Mike (09:01.148)
Yes.

Katy Howell (09:03.4)
not the sale.

Mike (09:04.968)
Exactly. Absolutely. And we were talking before about the challenge when you get caught up in, especially B2B selling, is it's about filling the pipeline, getting the volume, looking at your conversion rates, looking at your win rates, tracking your wins and losses. Yes, all that is all relevant, absolutely. folks, as Marcus Kauke was saying to me the other week, 99 % of people that you talk to aren't ready to buy.

At that moment, they're not ready to buy because they haven't got a problem that they need solving, that if they don't solve it, it causes a lot of pain. So all you can do is build relationships with the relevant people that you think may one day need your services and keep adding value to the conversation. And then eventually, when the time's right, if they trust you, you'll be front of mind.

Katy Howell (10:00.339)
Absolutely. And you know what? I'll tell you this having been in sales for years is, is the it's not real work funnest. It's the fun part. Try to think of the word. The real joy in this is building relationships. And whether you're doing that via marketing, and I build relationships via marketing, via online, or face to face, it doesn't make any difference to me. You are building relationships. You are chattering to people.

Mike (10:11.1)
Ha ha

Exactly.

Katy Howell (10:30.033)
It's using voice notes in LinkedIn. And these are not standardized things. Often they're just random conversations I will have with somebody or remember that their kids are off and go, well, your kids are off. What are you doing? Are you going away? All that kind of stuff I pay attention to. make sure. And do you know what? It enriches my life. I learned so much. The

Mike (10:49.544)
Absolutely.

Katy Howell (10:56.553)
that's really enjoyable is getting to know human beings. That's the bit that's really interesting. And I think even if you're a marketeer and you're not responsible for the sale, you should look at it in the same way. Because when your marketing is focused in on building a relationship, you are now thinking, how can I share something that will be useful to that individual?

so that they can talk to me. You automatically move your brain into this phase of going, I'm empathetic, I can see you're busy. Here's something really useful for you to know. Let me untangle this mess that is floating about. You haven't got time to deal with this, so let me give you the three steps you need to take. And I don't mean the generic AI written rubbish. I mean, thinking stuff.

Mike (11:21.701)
Absolutely.

Mike (11:40.826)
Exactly. No, no,

Exactly. I I probably like you, Katie. When I read something, I'm kind reading it with two lenses. Yes, my own personal education, because I'm curious. But I'm also thinking, which of my kind of clients or prospects might find this interesting and insightful? And then I take the document and I summarize it. Yes, I might use a private GPT to do that and then take what it's done and then enrich it. I'd never just send it on.

I'm going send them a summary of this 100 page document and go, know, Claire, there's some really interesting insights in here that I thought were relevant to you. These are the three. We talked about this recently. Here's the three key points that came out of it. And here's a link to where it is in the report. That's just saved Claire from reading a 100 page report that she'll never likely get to. And it might just go, well, that was helpful. Thank you. That was interesting. Thanks for your perspective.

Katy Howell (12:37.577)
No. Yep. Yep.

Indeed. It's really straight and I'm don't get me wrong. I'm not anti AI. I do exactly the same AI for research, AI for summaries. Just don't go look at this LinkedIn post and write me an AI response because that's what is bland and vanilla. What you really need to do is you're trying to build a strong relationship. So going to AI and going, my clients told me about this audience they have.

go look online and tell me what you think there might be in terms of different types of demographics. Is there any psychographic data out there? Blah, blah, So actually it's a research assistant that sits alongside, that summarizes everything. I then use my noodle, you know, between this and translate that into something that's a functioning human conversation. But, but it does bring us to the two core strengths, which is you have to know your customer.

Mike (13:24.166)
Yes, exactly.

Katy Howell (13:38.655)
have empathy for the individual, and on the other side, know how to build a relationship. And I know agency side, we run really fast. Everything is running fast because that's how we survive. But the consequence of running very fast is that we tend to run fast after shiny and new, the new relationship. What we're really bad at doing is following through. And this current climate we're in, the recession we're in at the moment requires us to

consistent. It requires us to keep coming back and building on that relationship we've built in the first place because we don't know when this is going to break. So we need to be not only front of mind, but we need to prove that we're not just a one hit wonder. Here, hello, lovely meeting you. And then we bugger off because I think that makes a huge difference to what will happen as this recession lifts.

Mike (14:27.409)
Exactly.

Mike (14:35.164)
Yeah. And it will, because they always do.

Katy Howell (14:37.545)
Yeah, I mean, I think we were talking ages ago, this is our fifth, this is our fifth reception. Yeah, yeah. So I think at this point, we're just like, yeah, whatever. Yeah.

Mike (14:41.564)
Yeah, it's a fifth recession.

Mike (14:47.25)
Yeah, it will come back, because it always does. It will come back. So I think somewhere around that point, so see if this kind of resonates. Having an ICP is necessary. You need to know who you're trying to talk to, but it's nowhere near sufficient. You need to add empathy on top if you're going to stand a chance of breaking

Next question, Katie, let's talk about, how do you build, how do you effectively network for long term business development? You're a master at this. I'd say you're probably the best person I know at this. So how do you do

Katy Howell (15:28.58)
Right, okay, so first of all, you don't need a drink in your hand. I am now 19 months sober. So I've discovered that you can be just as bold without alcohol. So there's different types of networking, there's online networking and offline. So let's just talk about offline. So offline, I tend to go in with a very straightforward approach, which is I don't really talk about me ever. I ask about them. It's really easy.

And I keep asking about them, really? You know, starting with some of the small talk, you know, how did you get here? What did you think of the conference? All of these kind of things. And then I slip into the what about this and what are you doing here? And, you work for SAP. What's it like there? I know somebody who's over in Sweden. You know, you can see it. the way to do it is with joy and interest and curiosity.

offline. And to be honest, it often is the same online. But the way I'll always make connections, and I'll give you a little tip, for instance, if I go to a conference and I like the person on stage and I want to connect with them because they're knowledgeable, or they're interesting, or they might be a prospect, I will often send them a LinkedIn invite where I'll say, you made this point on stage and it really struck me, I'd love to connect.

And a few weeks later, I might go, I'd be really interested in having you on my podcast, or I'd be super interested in having a coffee. I'd love to pick your brains. All of these things are, you have to gauge, but we can all build relationships. Most of us can build relationships. You know, we're not completely isolated, lonely old brothers. So I think it's, there's too much emphasis put on

professional side of everything, where we become so nervous that we're not wearing the right thing or we're not doing it the right way. I think maybe my skill has come because my face does not fit the advertising and marketing and hasn't for most of my life. So I had two choices. I could leave the industry or I could embrace it and go sod it. One thing that's for sure

Mike (17:44.668)
Mm -hmm.

Katy Howell (17:51.541)
that in many of my networking meetings you don't see people who look like me. So I get remembered. I get remembered. Yeah. Usually because I'm quite sweary. Yeah.

Mike (17:56.774)
Yeah, yeah, you get remembered. For all the right reasons, Katie. For all the right reasons.

There is that as a theme, but yeah, because you've got something to say and you're an interesting person and you're interested in others. So just talk about one thing about the in -person networking. Whenever we catch up, be it every two months or every 12 months, you've always been out at an event, you've been out speaking at an event, you've gone to an industry awards,

You're constantly going out and you are meeting people. And I don't know how you find the energy, but you do it. But how do you find all these places to go to? And what would you say to people that, you know, maybe people that are in business development in the agency world earlier in their career and saying, what, does it really matter going to all of these events? What's your thoughts?

Katy Howell (18:37.963)
Yep.

Katy Howell (18:58.705)
I would go, I tend to go to everything I possibly can. The opening of an envelope type thing. And I will sometimes take a week off, but I try and network at least three times a week. That would be my kind of base level. Try and do at least two evenings, but that can vary depending on how knackered I am and how much I've got on. But, and I try everything because I'll very quickly gauge what doesn't

So the small local networking, I did one recently in a boathouse. Lovely, lovely, you know, absolutely, it was so one -on -one for me, it was just not worth it. But it was good fun to go and try something new. So I was looking at it like that. And then the other is that I will change the different, try different styles of networking because that in itself is really interesting. So if I go

conference, I'll otter the conference so that I can put summarised notes and then tag all the people I met and said, look, here's some of my notes from this. I will otter as an AI transcriber, sorry. I will take photographs with people and do selfies and then send them a selfie going, remember when we met here? That kind of thing. So I think it doesn't really matter where you find out. you know, where do I get...

Well, I belong to the marketing society. I joined the FinTech B2B marketing community. I belong to a lot of communities. I watch out for events that are happening. I make friends of people who run events. I make friends with people anyway. And they tell me, you're going to this. I'll go, what's this? I've never seen this. I might come along. And I enjoy them.

Mike (20:41.181)
You do?

Katy Howell (20:51.381)
That's basically I enjoy the different perspectives and as an expert in my field, which is what my role really is, my role is to be the expert on social media. I want to hear everyone's perspectives, even when that perspective might be on, you know, cookies or CRM stuff that's outside of my spectrum, because it helps me think about where my business is in comparison to theirs.

Mike (21:02.408)
would agree.

Katy Howell (21:20.097)
It also helps me hear what marketers are worrying about, what they're fretting about, what stage are they at? And I can see it. I can see where the FinTech community is compared to the B2B community, compared to the consumer community of marketers. I can see all those differences. And I think that gives me that information in my head that just sort of sits there mulling over so that when I have the next conversation.

so much easier.

Mike (21:51.506)
So I imagine people in the audience are like, yep, OK, get that. And not doing it should do more of it. Absolutely, it's a great reminder. But then the question that is in people's minds probably is, well, what's the benefit? So if you look at the long -term benefit, and let's not talk about the, saw someone last week and they sent me an RFP, because that's nonsense in my world, basically, because you don't have a relationship with that person. You met them. You've had a one -off instance with them.

They send you a RFP and say, would you bid? You aren't going to win that RFP. You are making up the numbers. But if you look at the longer term benefits, what would you say are the longer term benefits of the more traditional networking that seems to be going by the wayside a

Katy Howell (22:26.529)
Yeah.

Katy Howell (22:39.181)
Well, it is new business. So it's new business because you elevate your market standing. mean, you know, going back to Cialdini's seven reasons of influence, social proof is one of them. And social proof is that I walk into an event and loads of people know me now, makes it much easier. And come up rushing over to have a chat, social proof. I get introduced to people, you must meet Katie. She knows everything about social, social proof. So by

Mike (22:47.27)
Yes. Yep.

Mike (23:04.987)
Exactly.

Katy Howell (23:06.527)
Being embedded in your industry really helps because it gives you the authority to go and meet more people. But also the follow on from that, is, you know, and if you're like me and have the memory of a small aunt, you know, I'm terrible. I on the train home. Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. I think it's senility. But I make notes. Met Bob.

Mike (23:10.29)
Very good point.

Mike (23:25.97)
We share that, Katie, we definitely share that.

Katy Howell (23:34.389)
Bob said this to me, blah, blah, just maybe a one liner so that I don't because I promise you if I go to sleep, it's emptied out of my head. And the following day or the day after I'll often email them going, you were talking about this and I was thinking about this and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's partly in my nature to be like that because I never stop thinking about other people. People pleaser. So I never stopped doing it. And it's, I build on that relationship. It's the first

bit at the beginning of a relationship, when you meet someone in person, it creates a slightly stronger bonds than any other form of meeting someone. And when you get together in that fashion, not only do you meet people who could be your prospects, but you also meet people who will be your advocates and recommend you and often ask me to speak at events when I have plenty of opinions, you know that, for them to speak at things.

Mike (24:28.91)
Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

Katy Howell (24:34.589)
All of these things. And do you know what? I'll also make amazing friends. Friends who understand what it's like to be in our industry or our business or whatever it is that, and that in itself can be hugely supportive if you're in Biz Dev because it's a lonely job for many.

Mike (24:51.826)
I mean, the power of advocacy, my God, I forgot we should talk about that, is I've lost track of how many times someone's approached me and said, I was speaking to Jane the other week, and she said, you ought to talk to Mike about that thing you were talking about, because he seems to have quite a lot of views on that and experience. You can't buy that in marketing.

It's so important and so powerful.

Katy Howell (25:25.941)
Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you about a I'll tell you a wee story. So many, many moons ago, which be back in the early 2000s when I launched to music feature, we took a stand at a new, a new digital age event. We took a stand. you believe this? But part of it was to give information away. The information we were giving away, we put on flash drives, but I also did a few talks on how to use Twitter.

Mike (25:41.606)
Right. Wow.

Katy Howell (25:53.857)
You believe this, real 101 stuff. But we'd also done an analysis of brands on Twitter and what they were doing. And we put it on a flash drive and we gave this flash drive away. And I talked to this gentleman who was very young and maybe in his mid twenties, gave him a flash drive, had a chat to him. Do you know, he's just got back in touch with me. He's a VP of marketing. And he says, you don't remember me, but I remember you because you gave me a flash

Mike (25:56.198)
Yeah

Mike (26:15.975)
Wow.

Mike (26:21.688)
Wow.

Katy Howell (26:22.625)
20 years ago and it was really useful and really insightful. I mean, seriously, that's the value of the relationships that you make when you meet face to face. And a flash card.

Mike (26:26.117)
Exactly.

Mike (26:33.38)
Absolutely. And do something that they'll always remember. You know, of all the stuff that we take in every day, things stick in our mind. Make yourself memorable and they'll come back to you. What a great end to that particular piece. Next one. So the final question and then we'll wrap up in the next kind of five minutes. How do agencies showcase their differentiated talent? You know, ready for when the market starts to come back and it will.

Katy Howell (26:41.931)
Yeah. Yeah.

Katy Howell (27:03.259)
I think the big thing right now is strategy, thinking, intelligence, smarts. So your biggest differentiator is demonstrating that. And that does not mean just running a podcast or putting out logs. It means doing everything, absolutely everything. Everything you, all the relationships you build, it will be podcasts, will be lives, it will be content, it will be every single thing has got to add value, has got to find ways

in adding value, because if you're not doing that, you're missing the boat. That's your biggest differentiator is your expertise, because when the market lifts, that's what they're going to need. That's what your customer is going to want. Whether you're, to be honest with you, whether you're an agency or otherwise, that's what you're, that's what they're going to want. They're going to want the cloud service provider who really knows about how to integrate with legacy systems. They're going to want the agency that can understand.

digital out of home and knows exactly which site performs where, when and to what audience type. That's the kind of information and depth of information that you want to be putting out. And yeah, sure. Some people will steal, steal your stuff. I'm, I'm saying, yeah, go, go. Good luck to you. You know, it's never as good. I don't, I really don't care. If it helps you out, I'm delighted.

Mike (28:18.716)
They will. That's okay. I always think that's absolutely fine.

Katy Howell (28:31.477)
But actually what really ends up happening is that most of your customers begin to look at you as the de facto standard in best practice. And when they're thinking about, need to do something more on social. hope they think about me and I make it personal. I write my posts. I, not we, I make it personal because I care. I'm the one who cares. I'm the one who spends her time looking at the information going, what does this mean?

How does this translate? What's the opportunity? What's the risk? All of these things are the questions I ask myself. And then I distill that to make it easier for the individual to then go, OK, I can see this.

Mike (29:15.25)
Exactly. that, mean, interestingly, I've had lots of discussions about this recently about agency differentiation. Sadly, at the moment, a lot of agencies are starting to look very similar. They're all good agencies. They've all got good case studies. They've all got customer testimonials. They've all got very good people. They've all got a process and a methodology. And you start to go, OK, so how do you differentiate? So just watch your

perspective on true differentiation within an agency. How do you really stand out from the

Katy Howell (29:52.629)
That you're going to, I can see a lot of agencies rolling their eyes at me, you need personality. Personality. so we go out and our message at the moment during this recession is that we are marketeers who fell in love with social media. The reason we go out with that message is there are a lot of social media agencies out there and we think that's great. Fabulous. They know how to do social media.

Mike (29:56.552)
good! No that's good Katie. Excellent!

Katy Howell (30:21.365)
We know how to do marketing and we love social media. And marketing is a thing that will get you the growth, the results, not the number of engagements, the business results that you want. that, that is the premise, the ground floor. And then you need to go out with personality. Our LinkedIn posts are bright. There is a reason they're bright and they look like coloured sweets. And that is because they stand out in feed and we changed a lot.

Mike (30:42.492)
Yes. Good.

Katy Howell (30:50.461)
And every single one of my team writes a blog post every single working day. Every single working day, we have a blog post written by a team from my designers all the way through to people like myself. Right. It roughly means about one a month. It's not too arduous, but everyone was a whole company is involved in social media marketing. So at the moment we're going out with a thing called summer sparks, which is a look at our evergreen content and

Mike (31:07.739)
No, exactly.

Katy Howell (31:20.561)
It is a revisit of some of the great things we've said in podcasts and webinars and things like that over the last six months. And we know that people are a bit quieter in August. So this is a time to catch up on your knowledge.

Mike (31:34.216)
they're reading. They're on holiday, but they're still reading LinkedIn, or they're still reading books or papers. Yeah, they might be passive, they're not engaging with you on social, but they're still reading stuff.

Katy Howell (31:39.455)
Yep. Yep.

Katy Howell (31:48.593)
Yeah, yeah. So I think the biggest differentiator is get a personality, have it multiple personality if you can. We have an overarching personality, but each of our individuals that go out with stuff go out with it in their own way. But you can see the quality and substance of the whole of the organization. I'm not ashamed whether you've been here six months or 60 years. It doesn't make any difference to me. We are passionate about social, but we're marketers and we're looking at how it impacts the business.

That is all we go out with, with a lot of personality. If you look at my posts, I hope they have personality, but they're usually a little bit rude, a little bit chatty, a little bit, my God, I didn't think of this.

Mike (32:22.93)
They do. Yeah.

There are a little bit of all those things and a lot of you. And that's the point. It's you. That's who Katie

Katy Howell (32:31.381)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So our differentiator is our people. We're a people business. We don't sell anything else but people. If we can't differentiate on people, no amount of frameworks, no amount of having done it before, no amount of case studies makes it. They want to know that they can trust us. That means every single individual has to be trusted. That we have their best interests at heart. That's why I run an agency.

because I have their best interests at heart. That's why I want to do the best I can. It's the best one you can have for them.

Mike (33:06.788)
Exactly. For them. And that differentiation, if you look at what I was talking to a guy in the States who's written a book around, yeah, what makes a difference these days? And he talks about personality. You know, you've got to, when you go into a room, you've got to not only know your stuff inside out, back to front, at a lot of depth, but you've got to bring it with some sort of personality. Because what was interesting was he said, when you're doing a pitch,

He said, imagine you're the buyer. You've got to be able to work with these people. And when you face difficult problems, if that person, so in the room, let's say you're leading the pitch, if I ask a difficult question, rather than going, I don't know, I'll come back to you. Or I know what the answer to that is when you don't, because how do you know what's really in my head? Live digging into the problem going, let's explore this together.

Let's just like work out how we might attack this. Is the problem statement right? What are the options? Doing that live takes confidence, experience, you get it right, and you're the memorable agency in the room that they'll never forget. They interactively helped me solve that problem. I don't care what the answer was. It was the process they went through of the thinking and the engagement.

Katy Howell (34:31.905)
Yeah, it does require experience and thoughtfulness and expertise and that is a bit of a struggle in agencies because we tend not to like old people. As an old person I feel confident in doing this, which is ridiculous because actually, you know, I do have 40 years business experience, years of running one agency and

Mike (34:43.44)
Right.

No, you're quite right. As an old person I can also vouch for that. Yes, definitely.

Mike (34:56.882)
Yeah, absolutely.

Katy Howell (35:00.711)
actually I can think of questions on the spot and I can help and also I have the confidence because I'm not trying to build

Mike (35:06.45)
You have the confidence. And you've got a memory. You've got long -term memory of questions that were asked in a similar vein. And what did we talk about then and how did that pan out? And you can tell stories, lots of stories.

Katie, it's been amazing. As always, it's just been like being in a coffee shop having a chat together, which is precisely what I wanted. Katie, where can people find out more about

Katy Howell (35:30.334)
Amazing.

If they look me up Katie Howell on LinkedIn, that's probably the best place to go. It's probably the place I'm most vocal. But if you fancy seeing what I do outside of work, you're very welcome to join me on threads. I am under the name Katie Howell. I have managed to snap on my full name.

Mike (35:49.724)
Well done. Very good. Katie, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much.

Katy Howell (35:54.689)
pleasure.

Mike (35:56.304)
Right, let me stop recording, Katie. Let's just check that that.